


Family

by quadrotriticale



Category: Marvel, X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Mentions of Suicide, Mentions of War, Mentions of self-harm, POV Alex Summers, POV Second Person, also just probably illegal use of pyrotechnics, and im like fuck ok alex summers is fucked up, anyway, because i like me some tragic backstories, discuss with me my extensive alex summers headcanons, here u go i wrote this, i also like me some genuinely getting better so ya, i gave him more issues, i guess its angst with a happy ending actually, if u read and u think i should change the rating pls lmk, im talking reboot movies alex specifically bc dudes got some fucking issues, mentions of experimentation (in passing), yallre like wow danny thats dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 03:01:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14823974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quadrotriticale/pseuds/quadrotriticale
Summary: Something happens today that you don't expect though, something that doesn't line up with your world view or your on-hold plan to kill yourself before you turn 20. A crying baby is plopped into your arms by a mother who clearly doesn’t care, doesn't love the child she's spent 9 months carrying, doesn't give a shit about this... thing, this tiny person that can't take care of itself.





	Family

**Author's Note:**

> normally i dont do the 'your name is' shit in my fics because that's way too fucking homestuck for me but yall dont understand my intricate and complex set of headcanons for reboot xmen movies summers brothers. there is a lot. theres so much. just so much i think id run out of room if i wrote it here fuck

Your name is Alex Summers, but it wasn’t always that. At 19 years old, you’re living at the house of a couple who don’t care for much other than money and ‘friends’ and their own image. You don’t think they expected you to come live with them once you got out of prison, but you think they’re too afraid of you to decline. That, or they’ve found a way to make housing a felon look good to their friends, probably something about homing troubled youths. You have nowhere else to go (you do, though, you just don't want to admit it), so you stay here, in their too-clean house with their white-washed walls and vaulted ceilings and tacky out of date decorations. It's 1964, and you're tired.

At 19 years old, you can’t lay on your stomach without having panic settle in your gut, and your back isn’t much better. You prefer the quiet and the solitude of your own room, but you need to know exactly how to leave, have to keep your window open so there’s an easy exit because you're too used to being trapped, too used to confined and inescapable places- freedom is sacred, scary, as delicate as a baby bird and you really don't want to ruin it. If you’re idle long enough you zone, end up in a haze that you won’t break for at least a few hours unless you go for your pocketknife, so you try to keep busy. You draw, you read, you climb out the window and walk around the block until it's half past 4 in the morning and your feet hurt so bad you limp, because you’re restless and you’re angry and you need to stay busy or else you space out, or you think yourself into a hole, into a panic, into a deep and endless depression that makes you wish you were dead. You don’t sleep much. Things were bad before, but you haven’t been able to get better yet, to heal at all. If anything, you think you’ve gotten worse. 

Something happens today that you don't expect though, something that doesn't line up with your world view or your on-hold plan to kill yourself before you turn 20. A crying baby is plopped into your arms by a mother who clearly doesn’t care, doesn't love the child she's spent 9 months carrying, doesn't give a shit about this... thing, this tiny person that can't take care of itself. She’s on the phone almost as soon as she's in the door, she’s busy, and you really don’t know how you’re supposed to hold a baby, especially one so small. You didn’t even know people could be this small. It takes you a little while to figure out how to calm him down, you don't think your confusion about how to hold him helps you much. You bounce him gently, rock him, loosen his blanket so he can get his tiny arms free. You breathe a sigh of relief when he finally stops wailing and give yourself a moment to try to understand him.

The baby’s name is Prescott, it takes you three days in which you're just calling him 'baby' to find that out, but you decide to call him Scott. For a while when he’s small, his eyes are big, more grey than the blue they end up being. You’re there when he starts crawling, when he starts walking, when he starts to speak. He’s small. He’s fragile and he’s bright and he’s so glaringly innocent that you don’t know what to do, because he's lucky you were there or the world would have ruined him before he had a chance to be anything, would have ruined him like it ruined you. You tell yourself you're going to keep him safe, and you do your best.

You don’t want him to hurt. You want him to keep whatever it is that he has that allows him to be what he is, and if he can’t keep it, you want him to have something just as good. You want him to grow up strong, grow up proud and happy and alive in all the ways that you didn’t, that it takes you a long time to even get close to. Scott feels like a second chance to you, almost. Like some higher power has given you a chance to do something good, to redeem yourself of all the bad things you’ve done and of all that’s inherently wrong about you, and you’re thankful. You’ve never been one for religion, but you think if there is a God, if he’s as benevolent and as graceful as some people claim, you think he’s the reason Scott is in your life. Whether it’s fate or chance, you’re thankful.

When he’s two, he falls off the counter in the kitchen while you're out, and cracks his head on the floor. That's where you find him when you get home, if you can call it that. You drive him to the hospital in a rush, carry your limp and bleeding baby brother (not your child, no, you can't be a father) into the ER and almost lose control because you’re afraid and you’re angry and you’re scared like you were when you were 13 and there was blood on the wall in a burning house. (It's a different kind of fear, though, not one for yourself but for this helpless, hurting little boy that you're in charge of. You're scared for him. You're angry for him.) There’s heat in your chest and you’re burning but you keep it under wraps as best you can because Scott needs to be safe, and you can't have a meltdown in the lobby, you can't have a meltdown in the lot, they'll take you away again and he'll have to go back to that fucking house without you. He’s taken in and you find some place quiet to breathe, to push the heat and the plasma away from the surface and to level yourself out enough to be something other than an active warhead. His parents try to visit, and you catch them complaining about how their two year old is in the hospital, what an inconvenience he is. You almost blast his mother's head off. She leaves, terror in her eyes, pink mouth pressed into a fine line, and you don't see her or Scott's father until you take him home. They tiptoe around you more than usual, and you tend to your baby, your adoptive brother in peace for a few months.

You’re drafted when he’s three and he cries when you leave. You lie and tell him you'll only be gone a little while, you'll be home soon, you'll write while you're away. You cry, privately, when he can't see you and you're away from prying eyes. You send him treasures you find overseas while you’re gone so he knows you’re okay, and so he knows you haven’t forgotten about him. You spend the whole time you're away trying to get home- you'd admit later, to no one but yourself, that 'trying to get home' meant just living at all, because war is Hell and you already dealt with depression. Something else happens out there, something involving your status as a mutant and experiments and isolated tents, but you don't talk about that, pretend it doesn't exist. It hurts, and it's hard to remember, and you like to pretend that you don't. (It still creeps into your nightmares, into your thoughts when you let your guard up.)

You don’t see Scott again until he’s seven. You can tell something’s wrong very soon after you get home- for one, you find him waiting for you on sidewalk in front of his house, sock feet, chalk in hand. For another, he's quiet and internal in a way that you recognize, has bags under his eyes that you're sure he's too young to have, but you don’t know how you’re supposed to fix it or how you’re supposed to help him heal from four years of whatever it was that hurt him so badly. You resign yourself to trying to make sure that he knows he’s loved, and that he knows he’s safe with you, and he can come to you if he needs to. He’s the one good thing you have in your life, the one thing that keeps you going, and you want to keep him safe. You try your best, but life happens and he still ends up hurt. There’s not much you can do, but you try. Scott means the world to you and you try your best to make sure he knows that. You’re loud, angry and reckless and aggressive, but with him you’re soft, you’re gentle and you’re quiet because he deserves to feel cared for and he deserves to have a safe place.

At midnight on his 15th birthday (you're 34 now, good lord, you're 34), you take him out of the city, far away from all the city lights and noise and sounds. You’ve got fireworks in the trunk, and for the first forty five minutes of the drive, you keep the music quiet on the radio and you just talk to him. It’s nothing specific, not really. Anything and everything you can think of, you talk about. You tell him stories when he asks, tease him a bit, poke his ribs where you know he’s ticklish, try to screw up his hair while you drive. You’re happy, and for once, you feel light, like there’s air in your lungs and the weight on your shoulders is gone, the heat in your chest has ebbed. You’re happy, and he seems like he is too. Scott starts to doze at the forty minute mark and you let him, shut the radio off once you’re sure he’s asleep and don’t bother waking him until you’ve gone down a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. In the sky you can see the stars, all of them you think, and you grin. You wake your brother before you get out of the car, and go to grab the fireworks from the trunk. You’re pretty sure this is illegal, but you don’t care. You’re going to have fun, you’re going to burn shit, and it’s going to be a good night. 

You set up the fireworks a ways down the road, come back to the car where you left Scott, and sit up on the hood. He clambers up beside you, rubbing his eyes and asking what you're doing as his eyes drift from you to the rockets you've set up down the road. It dawns on him, slowly, and you catch his look of excitement. You’ve been practicing, you think you can hit the places where you left the fuses without knocking over the rest of it and you’re kind of excited to show off, you don't get many chances. There aren’t a lot of practical uses for your mutation, so you haven’t had many opportunities to show your brother what you can do in ways that aren’t inherently destructive, so this is important to you. You offer him ear plugs before you start, because you know it’ll be loud and you don’t want him to get a migraine, or at the very least, you don’t want any headache that he already has to get any worse with the explosions. You want him to have a good time, for once, you know he's been having a rough go of things even if he hasn't been telling you. You can see it on his face, in the scrunch of his shoulders.

It takes you two tries to light the first fuse. You misjudge the recoil on the first blast from your closed fist, watch it fly over your set up and crash unceremoniously into the ground behind. So, you try again, try to aim more carefully. You miss, again, don't hit the fuses direction, but you don't miss by that much, and your plasma is hot enough that it catches fire anyway. You grin when it goes up, watch Scott for a reaction when it explodes in the sky, all colors and sparkles and noise. You light the next one, and the other ones after that when you’re sure he’s enjoying it. This is for him, after all. You’d stop if he didn’t like it. You only watch the last one, arm around his shoulder, wish him a ‘happy birthday, squirt’ when the lights fizzle out and mess up his hair. He shoves you away, laughing, and you laugh too, because you’re happy and everything is right, for once. You shoo him back into the car and he dozes off before you get back into the city, but not before he thanks you, which you tell him he doesn’t need to do. It’s two in the morning when you stop for ice cream at the only place open this late in the city, and it’s four when you finally go home, in through the front door because his parents wouldn’t argue with you and you’re staying for a few days because of his birthday. You might let him sleep at your place on the weekend. You’d let him sleep there every day if you could legally adopt him, or if he could get out of his parents house permanently without them throwing a fit. They don’t give a shit, you don’t know why they bother to pretend. When he’s 18, you’ll let him move in if he can’t get a place of his own, you think. 

(Of course, you don't know what the next year brings.)

(...but if you did, you'd still be proud of him.)


End file.
